15 years ago (on Feb 1st, 1999) I first set foot in a Google datacenter. Well, not really -- in the Google cage in the Exodus datacenter in Santa Clara. Larry had led me there for a tour (I wasn't an employee yet) and it was my first time in any datacenter. And you couldn't really "set foot" in the first Google cage because it was tiny (7'x4', 2.5 sqm) and filled with about 30 PCs on shelves. a1 through a24 were the main servers to build and serve the index and c1 through c4 were the crawl machines.

By that time we already had a second cage, immediately adjacent, that was about 3x larger and contained our first four racks, each containing 21 machines named d1-42 and f1-42 (don't ask me what happened to the b and e racks, I don't know). I don't recall who manufactured d and f but they were trays with a single large motherboard and a Pentium II CPU. (Later, the g rack would be the first corkboard rack.)

Some interesting details from the order:

- Yep, a megabit cost $1200/month and we had to buy two, an amount we didn't actually reach until the summer of 1999. (At the time, 1 Mbps was roughly equivalent to a million queries per day.)

- You'll see a second line for bandwidth, that was a special deal for crawl bandwidth. Larry had convinced the sales person that they should give it to us for "cheap" because it's all incoming traffic, which didn't require any extra bandwidth for them because Exodus traffic was primarily outbound.

- Note the handwritten "3 20 Amps in DC" change to the standard order form. At the time, DC space was sold per square foot, and we always tried to get as much power with it as possible because that's what actually mattered.

- This particular building was one of the first colocation facilities in Silicon Valley. Our direct neighbor was eBay, a bit further away was a giant cage housing DEC / Altavista, and our next expansion cage was directly adjacent to Inktomi. The building has long since been shut down. ﻿

The packet capture shown in these new NSA slides shows internal database replication traffic for the anti-hacking system I worked on for over two years. Specifically, it shows a database recording a user login as part of this system:

Recently +Brandon Downey, a colleague of mine on the Google security team, said (after the usual disclaimers about being personal opinions and not speaking for the firm which I repeat here) - "fuck these guys":

I now join him in issuing a giant Fuck You to the people who made these slides. I am not American, I am a Brit, but it's no different - GCHQ turns out to be even worse than the NSA.

We designed this system to keep criminals out. There's no ambiguity here. The warrant system with skeptical judges, paths for appeal, and rules of evidence was built from centuries of hard won experience. When it works, it represents as good a balance as we've got between the need to restrain the state and the need to keep crime in check. Bypassing that system is illegal for a good reason.

Unfortunately we live in a world where all too often, laws are for the little people. Nobody at GCHQ or the NSA will ever stand before a judge and answer for this industrial-scale subversion of the judicial process. In the absence of working law enforcement, we therefore do what internet engineers have always done - build more secure software. The traffic shown in the slides below is now all encrypted and the work the NSA/GCHQ staff did on understanding it, ruined.

Thank you Edward Snowden. For me personally, this is the most interesting revelation all summer.﻿

I’ve been involved since we first started testing authorship markup and displaying it in search results. We've gotten lots of useful feedback from all kinds of webmasters and users, and we've tweaked, updated, and honed recognition and displaying of authorship information. Unfortunately, we've also observed that this information isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped, and can even distract from those results. With this in mind, we've made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results.

(If you’re curious -- in our tests, removing authorship generally does not seem to reduce traffic to sites. Nor does it increase clicks on ads. We make these kinds of changes to improve our users’ experience.)

On a personal note, it's been fun and interesting travelling the road of authorship with all of you. There have been weird quirks, bugs, some spam to fight, but the most rewarding thing has been (and will continue to be) interacting with webmasters themselves. We realize authorship wasn't always easy to implement, and we greatly appreciate the effort you put into continually improving your sites for your users. Thank you!

Going forward, we're strongly committed to continuing and expanding our support of structured markup (such as schema.org). This markup helps all search engines better understand the content and context of pages on the web, and we'll continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results.

It’s also worth mentioning that Search users will still see Google+ posts from friends and pages when they’re relevant to the query — both in the main results, and on the right-hand side. Today’s authorship change doesn’t impact these social features.

As always, we’ll keep expanding and improving the set of free tools we provide to make it easier for you to optimize your sites. Thank you again, and please keep the feedback coming.﻿

A so-called "Dollar Bill" or "Note" as it is formally known. Credit:
Wikimedia Commons
Or how cash would be described in the press if invented today. Full
bitcoin series here:
Bizarre Shadowy Paper-Based Payment System Being Rolled Out Worldwide
New York, February 17, 2014
World governments announced a plan today to allow citizens to anonymously
carry parts of their wealth on their person and exchange it with others
using ...

When using +Google Chrome, you can copy slides from one presentation to another, bring shapes from drawings into a slide, or even take tables from a spreadsheet and paste it into a +Gmail message -- and formatting stays exactly the same. You can access copy/paste using keyboard shortcuts or from the right-click menu.

On a different browser? Try the web clipboard which will also help you copy and paste: http://goo.gl/WZxKH﻿

HI Peter. Thanks for this. I will try it soon. Still getting used to Google plus. No apparent order of posts. And half the page is filled with stuff like "You may know" which I am not sure I want. I am still a bit 20th century I guess.﻿

A faster, safer way to sign in. You keep your iPhone with you all the time. Now you can use it as a password. You never have to open the app— just knock on your phone twice, even when it's in your pocket, and you're in. What if my phone is lost or stolen? Stolen phone-proof ...